


gone native

by nebulousviolet



Category: The Mortal Instruments Series - Cassandra Clare, The Shadowhunter Chronicles - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, Pre-Canon, Pre-City of Bones, character study-esque, introspective, isabelle and aline are two sides of the same coin babey!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-13
Updated: 2020-09-13
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:26:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26441158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nebulousviolet/pseuds/nebulousviolet
Summary: “You wouldn’t get it,” Isabelle says. “New York and Idris - they’re opposites. I’m a different person there than I am here.” It becomes true as soon as she says it, a realisation strung out for all to see. “It’s like living two different lives. My voice doesn’t even sound the same.”—Or: the meaning of home.
Relationships: Isabelle Lightwood & Aline Penhallow
Comments: 1
Kudos: 6





	gone native

**Author's Note:**

> spongebob voice: so now the isabelle lightwood kinnie’s going to preach to us!  
> saw a post on tumblr the other day by carvesdeath about isabelle’s complex relationship with idris after max’s death and my goblin brain was like YES but ALSO let’s give isabelle an identity crisis about which nation she considers her homeland!!  
> i imagine this to be set the year before the events of CoB, so isabelle is fifteen, but there isn’t really a specific time frame. just know it’s from before clary came onto the scene.

It’s quiet in Idris. Always so quiet, even in Alicante - Isabelle doesn’t sleep well without the background lullaby of Manhattan, a cacophony of noise and traffic that has lulled her to sleep for as long as she can remember. Maybe that’s why she feels so nauseated while she’s here. Maybe it’s something else.

There’s a Council meeting down at the Gard, something about Accords negotiations and the commemorations for the innocents killed at the Uprising, which is why they are here - Maryse and Robert play the roles of Institute heads and chastened rebels so well, after all. Max is with a bunch of the other little kids in the square, supervised by the few elderly Shadowhunters who call Idris their permanent home now that they are too infirm to fight, which leaves Isabelle and Aline alone. Jace and Alec are back in New York. Isabelle wishes she’d stayed, too.

“It’s a shame Alec isn’t here,” Aline says as the two of them sit out in the Penhallows’ garden. It’s a beautiful day, always so beautiful in the Shadowhunter homeland - the sky is so blue that it hurts to look at, the air temperate and dry and clean. Nothing like the smog that Isabelle is accustomed to in the city. “Why didn’t he come again?”

“Jace wanted to stay behind,” Isabelle repeats, somewhat begrudgingly. She hopes that Aline doesn’t have any grand ideas when it comes to winning Alec’s affections. Isabelle considers it a moral duty to make her brother happy, and as much as she likes Aline, a forced relationship between her and Alec would get in the way of that duty. “So Alec had to stay too. You know how it is with parabatai.”

Idris is familiar to Jace in a way that it isn’t to Isabelle, to whom it is a foreign country, each visit like a holiday rather than a homecoming. Perhaps too familiar; Isabelle sees the way Jace’s expression shutters when he talks about his father, Michael Wayland, and she privately thinks that his refusal to join them is less an act of teen angst (as Robert and Maryse seem to think) and more of a defence mechanism. But Isabelle isn’t going to say that to Aline. Aline isn’t family. Jace might not be Isabelle’s responsibility, but she’s still keeping his secrets anyway.

“They’re an odd pair,” Aline muses. Aline, who has met Jace only once, has clearly been thinking about this. Isabelle turns her face away from the sky and over to her friend with a frown. “I always thought you and Alec would be parabatai, actually. It’s not that uncommon between siblings, and you’re so close.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Isabelle says flatly. Nobody in the New York conclave has a parabatai; the ones that did have had the bond severed by death. It’s another part of her culture that she has missed. “Anyway, Jace got there first.”

“And you didn’t ever want a parabatai?” Aline asks.

“No,” Isabelle says. It’s not really a lie. By the time she was old and mature enough to even consider it, Alec was already taken, and there’s no point wanting what you can’t have. “I can look after myself. And Alec and Jace have each other. There’s nobody else I need to look out for.”

It’s a brutal assessment of an objective truth. One day, when Max is old enough for killing, Isabelle will have to watch his back, too - but at eight years old, he’s at least another eight away from her needing to worry about him. The way a Shadowhunter’s life expectancy goes, Isabelle might not live to see it. That’s another reason why she’s against having a parabatai: one of them has to die first. Isabelle’s not a fan of self-inflicted pain, and 50/50 aren’t her preferred odds.

Something like disappointment flits across Aline’s pretty face. It occurs to Isabelle that perhaps this was a veiled proposal. After all, Aline is an only child, just as lonely as Isabelle is, if not more so. She doesn’t have the virtue of a built-in best friend. If Aline wants a parabatai, then Isabelle is her only real option.

“I mean,” Isabelle tries her best to soften the blow, something she’s never been particularly good at, “it’s just different, that’s all. I’ve been hunting demons for a while, and I know what works for me. I wouldn’t want to relearn that all over again.”

“That makes sense,” Aline concedes, and she picks a daisy from the lawn, twirls it between long fingers. Her hands aren’t half as scarred as Isabelle’s, even though she’s nearly two years older. Envy, ugly and curling in Isabelle’s gut, strikes her. “I can’t believe you get to hunt demons on your own. My parents would rather let me make out with a vampire than do that.”

Isabelle neglects to mention that she has made out with a vampire - several vampires, actually, because the Hotel Dumort has some hotties - and instead gives a little shrug. “I’m not really on my own. Alec’s so overprotective that it’s like having a parent around, sometimes. And there’s Hodge.”

“Still,” Aline insists, and she picks the daisy to pieces, shredding petals with several deft movements. “It’s more than I get over here.”

Idris, Isabelle thinks idly, is a gilded cage. It may look pretty, but in the end it’s no better than the New York Institute, with its crushing stone walls and wrought-iron gates. Isabelle knows about using beauty as a lure, about honeytraps. She thinks she prefers facing danger head-on. 

“You should come visit,” Isabelle offers. “I think you’d like it, at home. We could all go out together. I could show you Times Square. You’d like it more than Jace does.”

And Aline tilts her head. “Home,” she repeats, as if she’s cracked something. “New York is your home, isn’t it? Not Idris. You hate it here.”

“I don’t hate it,” Isabelle protests, thrown. “It’s - I’m used to New York. I’m not used to it here.”

Everything in Idris is different. The food. The people. The way things smell and sound and feel - it’s like seeing something in HD after only ever watching staticky black-and-white. That’s supposed to be good, right? But Isabelle misses home, misses scowling at creeps on the subway and buying mystery meat from street stands and traipsing through Fifth Avenue, pretending for a fraction of a second that she lives a life so very different to the one assigned to her. 

She doesn’t expect Aline to understand. She doesn’t think anyone understands, not really - not Alec, who has vague, fuzzy memories of the motherland, enough for a connection, not Max, who accompanies their parents on every trip over, and certainly not Jace, who has spent more time here than he has ever spent in the Institute. Going native is an experience so frowned upon that it’s fitting only a Shadowhunter in exile could attain it. The cruel irony is that Isabelle isn’t even the one exiled.

“You wouldn’t get it,” Isabelle says. “New York and Idris - they’re opposites. I’m a different person there than I am here.” It becomes true as soon as she says it, a realisation strung out for all to see. “It’s like living two different lives. My voice doesn’t even sound the same.”

It doesn’t - when she’s in Idris her vowels elongate and her accent transforms into something eerily reminiscent of her mother. So far removed from her voice at home, from her ability to cuss people out in four different languages. Isabelle doesn’t even think it’s conscious. It just...happens.

“I know what you mean,” Aline says faintly. When Isabelle cocks her head in confusion, she blushes, and wipes her hands hurriedly on her skirt. “I mean - it makes sense. I’ve read about it.”

That’s bullshit, Isabelle knows. It’s Alec-brand bullshit, really. Maybe the reason why Aline wanted Alec to visit was so they could trade terrible lies with one another. Still, Isabelle isn’t as devoid of tact as she appears, so she lets the weirdness slide.

“Yeah, well,” Isabelle says. She tries and fails not to sound too bitter. “You’re lucky you’ve only had to read about it. It’s not as fun as it sounds.”

Isabelle is suddenly furious, rage burning white hot in her veins, and she storms back inside. If Alec were here, he’d - well, Alec’s not here, so it doesn’t matter. She breathes vehemently through her nose and out through her mouth, trying not to puke all over Jia Penhallow’s expensive carpets. 

There’s no cell service in Idris, making the cell phone that Isabelle begged and cajoled her way into getting completely useless. As if Isabelle couldn’t feel any more split in two. Aline wouldn’t know where to begin with a cell phone, she thinks. Alec can hardly work his own, and he sees them every day.

“Hey.”

It’s Aline. She’s hovering in the doorway, ghostly, uncertain. “I wasn’t trying to be mean,” she adds. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with thinking of somewhere else as - as home.”

“It’s just me,” Isabelle says. “Nobody else in my family thinks of New York as home. Deep down, my parents still believe they’ll return permanently to the Glass City one day. Jace threw a fit about wanting to stay behind this week, but that’s just temporary. I know he’ll come rushing back as soon as he turns eighteen, and he’ll bring Alec with him. And then I’ll have to choose.”

“I’m sorry,” Aline says. “If it makes you feel any better, it’s not great for me, either. All the tradition really weighs you down.”

And she means it, Isabelle knows; she can see the same faint exhaustion in Aline’s delicate features as she sees in Alec, like tissue paper stretched so thin that it begins to tear. Odd - Isabelle had never thought Alec and Aline were similar before today. She’s having all sorts of revelations.

But Isabelle thinks she understands, too. Jia Penhallow’s sitting room is an art gallery, ornate and lovely but not comfortable, not a place to live in. Alicante may be the City of Glass, but it’s a cruel illusion; there’s no such thing as transparency there, only the murky waters of Shadowhunter politics and the awful, heavy reminder of Valentine Morgenstern. When Isabelle was thirteen, Hodge sat her and Alec and Jace down and told them about what had happened to the previous occupiers of the New York Institute, and from then on, Isabelle had only ever seen her parents steeped in blood. For Aline, almost every other adult she knows must be the same. The history of the Circle and those who were once members is so vast and shadowed that it manages to ruin both of their lives, even across an ocean.

“Don’t be so sure about Alec and Jace coming back here,” Aline says. “Things can always change.”

“The Law is hard, but it is the Law,” Isabelle quotes bitterly. “Nothing ever changes. That’s why we’re so backwards.”

“You don’t know that, Izzy,” Aline shakes her head, but Isabelle does know that. She knows it from years of watching Alec curl into himself, from the way Downworlders’ mouths form a little ‘o’ when they realise a Shadowhunter is amongst them, from the way her mother talks about Valentine Morgenstern, her resentment not enough to conceal the wistfulness in her voice. If Valentine Morgenstern couldn’t change things, even just for the worse, then Isabelle doesn’t see how anyone else can. And if Aline doesn’t know that, she’s more naïve than Isabelle thought.

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” Isabelle declares forcefully. “Can’t we go do some training instead?”

“Alright,” Aline agrees, appearing relieved, and the two of them go down to the weapons room together.

Outside, the sun is still shining. There isn’t a single car. The locals think the internet is a way of catching fish.

Isabelle misses home.


End file.
